Book Club: Our Next Book is…Fahrenheit 451

Hallo everyone! Happy International Worker’s day! I hope you’re all spending a wonderful day, wherever you are in the world.

I am so excited to be announcing our next read for our 2018 May Book Club Challenge on Elly’s Diary.com! After a long thought, I decided to finally opt for another American Classic: Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. I’ve been wanting to read this book for quite a while now, and it feels like the right moment has finally come.

I really do look forwards to starting it. I’ve heard nothing but good things about it. ‘Hypothetical future’ fiction tends to be one of my favourite genres, and this seems to be a masterpiece within its kind. I anticipate nothing but a wonderful encounter with a major page-turner.

Sixty years after its original publication, Ray Bradbury’s internationally acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451 stands as a classic of world literature set in a bleak, dystopian future. Today its message has grown more relevant than ever before.

Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television “family”. But when he meets an eccentric young neighbour, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known.

I will be posting a Q&A on this book on the 15th of May 2018. It will cover the first two parts of the book, up to page 106. Please be sure to read up to “Burning Bright” by then, if you are going to read along.

Let me know in the comments below if you are going to read Fahrenheit 451 with me!